Official narrative

Public enemy #1?

The official narrative is that the governments of the world must work together to preserve their citizens' dignity[3] to prevent citizens from using a range ofdrugs which are so dangerous as to overcome the weak-minded and vulnerable.

“A free market for drugs would unleash a drug epidemic, while a regulated one would create a parallel criminal market.”Antonio Maria Costa - [4]

In the USA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) must ensure that the drug prohibition laws are adhered to, while internationally drug control treaties are need to reduce drug supply. Even relatively harmless drugs such as cannabis must be prohibited since they act as "gateway drugs" to other, more harmful ones.

Official opposition narrative

The official opposition narrative is that it is a huge mistake which doesn't actually succeed in reducing drug consumption, drug-related crime or fatalities. Evidence cited includes the Dutch or Portugese policy of decriminalisation failed to "unleash a drug epidemic", and may in have lead to a decrease in recreational drug usage. In the USA by contrast, illicit drug use has been increasing[5]:- heroin use, for example, increased by 63 percent from 2003 to 2013.[6] In 2011, an article in The Guardian on the 40th anniversary of the "war on drugs" was critical of the policy, but didn't mention the experience of legalisation, or of John Ehrlichmans candid admission.[7] It concluded that drug policy should "started from the premise that life in most places is so awful that it leads to catastrophic addiction".[8]

The official opposition narrative doesn't question the putative altruism of the motivation behind the "war on drugs". In fact, more and more people are seeing that the deep state is playing both sides - shaping society according to its designs while reaping huge profits from both the global drug trade and the organised drug law enforcement actions, to say nothing of ancillary businesses such as the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration and drug related money laundering.[9]

Concerns

John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, admitted in a 1994 interview that the "War on Drugs" was a ploy to undermine Nixon's political opposition, candidly stating "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."[7]

Amidst the tired rhetoric about being "tough" on drug users, many observers have noted that some drugs such as cannabis have been de facto legalised in various European countries without a surge in demand — indeed, often with a decrease in use. This point is not dwelt upon by the commercially-controlled media, who continue to suggest that the "war on drugs" is really about reducing harm to people. Moreover, legal drug use in USA has surged during the same time, a trend rarely remarked upon in the context of the "war on drugs".[10] In fact, scientific considerations about the impact of recreational drug use on society as a whole or upon individual users are only of marginal interest to the politicians.[11]

The modern "War on Drugs", dated from US PresidentRichard Nixon's 1971 announcement that "drug abuse" was public enemy number one, continues the trend of a deceitful official narrative serving as cover for deeper purposes. The late 1960s was a period of growing disillusionment amongst US youth with the Vietnam War in particular and the establishment in general. This was a key opposition group which Nixon sought to disrupt. In 2011, The Guardian claimed that Nixon was "motivated by addiction among US soldiers in Vietnam."[8]

Psychedelics

Psychedelic drugs had been heavily researched by the CIA (Project MKULTRA and other such) and found to be unhelpful for military purposes, but potentially effective at weakening social conditioning. The importance of such drugs to the burgeoning peace movement can hardly have been lost on legislators. The 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances banned LSD and many other such drugs in USA and other signatory countries.

Purposes

The global drug trade has long been the source of immense profits for those groups which control it. Small scale trade is carried out by individuals and small groups, but nowadays the top levels are tightly dominated by deep state groups, which derive huge off-the-books profits from the practice. Some is fed straight back into black budgets to fund black ops, some is laundered and siphoned off as private profits. The "war on drugs" is essential to protecting these high profit margins.

Global Drug Trade

Profiteering

Banks profit from the consequent demand for money laundering, with some in Florida, for example, charging fees of a percent or two for 'counting' large cash deposits. A frequent comment about the "Global Financial Crisis" is that without drug money, the big banks would go out of business.

Big Pharma

Pharmaceutical companies financially support campaigns to prevent legalisation of recreational and pain-killing drugs.[15] In contrast to naturally occurring herbal remedies, many of which have long histories of safe use, they seek to promote the use of chemical analogues. Adjudication of their relative lack of safety is up to the national regulatory bodies such as the FDA, many of which are captured by big pharma. As novel pharmaceuticals they are patentable - and therefore monopolizable, if naturally growing opposition can be eliminated through legal measures such as the "war on drugs".

Law Enforcement

Law enforcement and a privatised prison system provide further commercial incentives to keep drugs illegal. Former LAPD Deputy Chief Stephen Downing explains that the practice of sending undercover police into schools to buy drugs "is not about public safety – the public is no safer, and the school grounds are no safer. The more arrests you have, the more funding you can get through federal grants and overtime."[16]

Private Prisons

About half of the US prison population are locked up for drug offences; as a major part of the school-to-prison pipeline, the "war on drugs" is a major factor in the profitability of the private prisons.[16]Mandatory minimum sentences have seen non-violent drug dealers convicted for as long as 55 years without the possibility of parole.[17][18]

Social engineering

Sting operations are carried out in the US under the "war on drugs" even against children who have mental conditions such as autism. The movie Reefer Madness dramatically demonstrates how big media has been used to manipulate populations into accepting laws which infringe on existing human rights or civil liberties. As a victimless crime, possession of drugs is an charge which can easily be used to frame or threaten vulnerable people.

Around the World

The "War on Drugs" is regularly exploited a cover for US/Foreign Policy. The major drug producing regions of the world are of particular interest to the deep state.

Afghanistan

In 2014 the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John F. Sopko admitted that "Despite spending over $7 billion to combat opium poppy cultivation and to develop the Afghan government’s counternarcotics capacity, opium poppy cultivation levels in Afghanistan hit an all-time high in 2013."[19]Sibel Edmonds explains that profits from opium production and export has been massively streamlined and stepped up during the US occupation of Afghanistan, and that Russia has been more or less cut out of the trade, leaving Turkey as the major shipping point.[20]

Related Document

Related Quotations

“You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

“Forget about drug deaths and acquisitive crime, about addiction and AIDS. All this pales into insignificance before the prospect facing the liberal societies of the West, like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming car. The income of the drug barons is an annual five hundred thousand million dollars, greater than the American defence budget. With this financial muscle they can suborn all the institutions of the state and, if the state resists, with this fortune they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages of rule by the gang. If the west relishes the yoke of the tyrant and the bully, current drug policies promote that end.”

“To understand this war and to understand the problems of heroin in particular, you need to grasp one core fact. In the words of Professor Arnold Trebach, the veteran specialist in the study of illicit drugs: "Virtually every 'fact' testified to under oath by the medical and criminological experts in 1924... was unsupported by any sound evidence." Indeed, nearly all of it is now directly and entirely contradicted by plentiful research from all over the world. The first casualty of this war was truth and yet, 77 years later, it still goes on, more vigorous than ever.”

February 2001

== Rating ==

26 August 2016RobinAn expose of the truth behind this elaborate fictionA still slightly random assortment of ways in to the purposes of the fiction of drug interdiction and the reality of the multi-trillion dollar business which this charade evolved to protect.